To celebrate the 20 year anniversary of Red Scare Records, we’ve partnered up with Toby Jeg to interview some of our favorite bands playing Red Scare’s Las Vegas takeover this weekend. Here are 5 questions with Devin Peralta from Cobra Skulls! Catch Cobra Skulls Saturday 9/28 at The Usual Place
I was just with you and Cobra Skulls for Riot Fest this past weekend. Two great sets! But let’s be honest, what’s better: hanging with those posers or with US in Vegas?!
Haha! Yes, yes, no need to compare cobras here. We loved the opportunity to play Riot Fest again after all these years. We never got to play many big festivals, but Riot was one where we always felt the love. That goes for Chicago in general, really. But that said, we are as stoked to be in Vegas with the Red Scare fam and just have a lot of fun, possibly even play a song or two!
Cobra Skulls were formed in Nevada. Not a ton of bands come from there, but that must be a source of pride? Everyone loves an underdog story, right?
Yah, the band just started with my friends Chad and Charles. They were from Idaho and I was from the central coast of California, but we loved a lot of the same bands and just started playing for fun. I mean our name is just camp really (lost on some), but we seemed to make a bit of a stir in Reno and then We just started playing Sacto, SF, and more West Coast shows. Then we met you, and things really took off after our first full length on Red Scare, touring all over US, Canada and Europe…
What is a Reno punk relic that belongs in The Punk Rock Museum?
Depends on the era, I suppose. You should probably ask Kevin Seconds? Maybe a brick from the old Reno News & Review building (if it still exists) – it was just south of the I-80, and I think in the 80s it was a squat and some of the early punk shows went on there, as well as the Townhouse, where 7 Seconds played their first show. Others might say that a brick from Ft. Ryland which was a house/basement that put on a lot of shows in the early 2000s.
Cobra Skulls: big Leftists. And we love ya for it. You guys have always had an insurgent message, so what does the future hold for our forsaken lot?
Oh man, not fortune telling, today, but yah, it’s funny we played a benefit show in Reno two years ago (our first show back in Reno for years), and we weren’t Leftist enough for some punks, or some band didn’t want to play because they thought we were Libertarians. I honestly think the most important thing we can do is get money out of politics—just go to public funding, four month race, rank choice voting. Then our government needs to make a hard stop on perpetuating the arms race and perpetual conquest of the world. Our country is broken because of the Military Industrial Complex and it also happens to be the biggest polluter in the world. If we have any chance at making it as a species on this planet we have to stop funding war. Problem with that is a lot of people have jobs in the military, not just those in service, but laborers, private citizens—entire towns depend on war factories to live day in and day out. We have a lot of investment and embodied energy that in this war machine, so they only way I see it working without destroying the economy and the lives of laborers in the industry is that the government has to make it happen. One way it could happen is the President could invoke the Defense Production Act (this was recently used successfully during the COVID pandemic), to turn defense production (ironically and beautifully) into industries of labor and production, that have gone overseas over the last few decades and made us dependent on imports at home and really less able to compete globally abroad. But to put it short, if I had to pick between Terminator, the Matrix, and Blade Runner… I’d say we’re heading more in the direction of Blade Runner with a littler Terminator on the side.
So you started out on Red Scare and now it’s 20 years old… have you come to Vegas to finally kill it off? They say there’s a lot of bodies buried out in that desert…
Cobra Skulls started in 2005 and someone just asked if we were doing a 20-year reunion show next year—that blew my mind. It is really weird thinking this stuff started 20 years ago. I’m not gonna say it makes me feel old. It does make me feel grateful to be a part of a group of people I really respect and enjoy as musicians and be able to continue to be a part of it after so long. It’s humbling to be appreciated by your peers and be a part of this dang thing that might not be for everyone, but that’s part of the reason why we like it, and it’s really an honor that people still care enough to come out and sing along to our songs. Red Scare has brought some really great bands to the forefront of Punk Rock in the last 20 years and we are stoked to celebrate it this weekend! I’m putting $100 on Cobra, how about you?
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